- published: 09 Feb 2012
- views: 123
Culturology or science of culture is a branch of social sciences concerned with the scientific understanding, description, analysis, and prediction of cultures as a whole. While different cultural practices were studied by ethnology and anthropology, these studies included diverse aspects: sociological, psychological, etc. and the need was recognized in a discipline focused exclusively on cultural aspects.
The word "culturology" is made up of Latin word "cultūra" and Greek suffix "logia" and it means "science of culture".
The notion of culturology (Russian: Культурология in the Russian Empire may be traced to the late 19th and early 20th centuries and associated with Mikhail Bakhtin, Aleksei Losev, Sergey Averintsev, Georgy Gachev, Yuri Lotman, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, and others. During the Stalinist era this kind of research was superseded by Marxist social studies. Culturology re-emerged in the Soviet Union as an interdisciplinary field in the late 1960s.